


Roadmaps

by HalfshellVenus



Category: Prison Break
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-09-27
Updated: 2005-09-27
Packaged: 2019-03-17 06:22:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13653258
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HalfshellVenus/pseuds/HalfshellVenus
Summary: Lincoln’s choices, and where they led.





	Roadmaps

x-x-x

Lincoln more or less knew what people thought of him. He personally thought he was smarter than they gave him credit for, but his life choices hadn’t done much to prove that. Mostly, people thought of him as a brawler who got into trouble.

Michael had always been the smart one, everyone had always agreed on that. This idea seemed a lot less valid lately, ever since Michael had landed himself in prison to bust Lincoln out. Sure, his heart was in the right place, but… come ON. Even Lincoln knew what a bad idea that one was.

Still, when it came to books and learning, Michael was good at that.

What Lincoln had always been good at was protecting Michael. He’d kept him out of trouble, and gotten him to adulthood without too many bumps along the way. He hadn’t been so good at protecting his own interests, true, but he thought he’d done all right by Michael, at least when they were kids.

Looking back on it, he’d covered the physical safety issues pretty well all those years. But the emotional parts—making sure Michael felt loved and secure—well, he might have floundered a little bit there. He hadn’t thought much about it at the time, and it hadn’t occurred to him that concrete actions and words of affection might be more than just extras. He’d been a kid much of that time himself, and he would probably have thought all that was mushy and unimportant anyway.

But now… well, he’d seen enough Dr. Phil and the like over the years to finally realize that it was necessary for kids to know directly that they were loved. Especially by their parents, or people acting as parents, which he essentially had done since their mother died. Basically, if a person needed to decode your actions and behavior to figure out whether you loved them, well, that person was probably headed for trouble later in life.

The kind of trouble, for instance, that might lead him to avoid moving towards settling down and having a nice wife and kids, and instead spend his adult years pursuing a relentless plan to put himself in jail and risk life and limb to save his brother.

Obviously, this was not what he would have planned for Michael. Hell, no sane person could have ever foreseen it.

There were roadmaps for success. And definitely ones for failure, Lincoln could vouch for that, since he’d pretty much followed one as written.

But where was the roadmap for un-fucking-up the mistakes you’d already made, and setting them right? The mistakes that affected other people as well as yourself?

Maybe a smarter man would have had the answer to that one.

 

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